Microsoft made a big splash yesterday with new ChatGPT-powered upgrades to its Bing search engine and Edge browser. Today, in what feels unlikely to be a coincidence, Google responded, presenting several AI-enhanced features for Search, Maps, and Translate during an event in Paris and giving a preview of its own “Bard” AI chatbot.
However, investors may not have been impressed — or they were scared off by an embarrassing AI flub — as the stock price for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dropped after the presentation.
Now, we’re waiting to see what’s revealed during the first Nintendo Direct presentation of 2023 that’s scheduled for 5PM ET.
Meanwhile, in the world of politics, President Joe Biden once again railed against Big Tech in his Second State of the Union address. “Pass bipartisan legislation to strengthen antitrust enforcement and prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage,” Biden said and went on to call for legislation to protect children from data tracking and targeted advertising.
And now, here’s a silly tweet to start your day (click through to the tweet it’s quoting for the context):
Stay tuned, as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: Tuesday, February 8th, 2023.
Big tech switched up the US’ first ‘right to repair’ bill just before it was signed into law.
A trade group that represents Apple, Google, Samsung, and HP asked Governor Kathy Hochul to make sweeping changes that would water down New York’s landmark bill.
You can see how they essentially rewrote chunks of the legislation thanks to documents obtained by Grist.
Here I am on CNBC talking about Google’s very hard path ahead.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is an extremely smart and thoughtful guy, but think about how hard his set of choices is right now: he has to roll out chatbot AI search in order to make investors happy, but rolling that out will instantly cause legal, ethical, and regulatory chaos, all while simultaneously increasing the costs of search and reducing the profits of web advertising. Yikes!
(Also, to be clear, I meant the end of this era of Google. Forgive me, it was 8am and I was in a hotel room in Bellevue.)
The big League of Legends midseason tournament is headed to London.
The Mid-Season Invitational, or MSI, pits top League teams from all across the world, and it’s one of my favorite gaming events of the year. MSI takes place over the course of many days in May, and you can buy tickets starting later this month.
Did Bowser write this email?
Today’s Nintendo Direct got one student at California State University Fullerton so worked up that they accidentally triggered a police threat response.
Campus police said they emailed a professor anonymously asking to cancel class because of a “once-in-a-lifetime event that would occur.”
The person must have been referring to the possibility of the Advance Wars remakes finally launching since Nintendo Directs happen pretty frequently.
Satya Nadella explains why Microsoft is taking on Google now.
You’ve seen the presentations, so you know what Microsoft and Google have shown when it comes to AI chatbot search.
Now take 20 minutes and see what Satya Nadella said on Decoder about Microsoft’s big plans for OpenAI and ChatGPT.
The battle over AI has just begun.
Microsoft and Google just announced AI-powered search tools, and Chinese companies are already catching on.
While ecommerce giant Alibaba tells CNBC that it’s working on a ChatGPT rival, gaming company NetEase similarly says it has goals to develop a generative AI product. It’s going to be a long year.
